A group of 48 dyslexic boys was compared with a group of 32 normal boys matched for age and I.Q. Dyslexia was operationally defined as two years reading retardation relative to other abilities in the absence of emotional disturbance, cultural deprivation or obvious physiological damage while maintaining a normal test intelligence. The two groups were compared on a temporally presented sequential memory test in both the visual and auditory modalities and using both pictures and words within the visual mode. The dyslexics performed significantly worse on the sequential memory test and on a recall test with the same stimuli. Moreover, both dyslexics and normals did better auditorally than visually, and pictures were easier than words. The pattern of response was parallel for the two groups with the dyslexic scores just dropped below the normals. A developmental lag theory of causation was strongly indicated by the data. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

No description available.

Inaug.-diss.--Basel. / At head of title: Aus dem Neurologischen ambulatorium an der Medizinischen universitäts-poliklinik, Basel. "Literaturverzeichnis": p. 17-18.

Inaug.-diss.--Basel. / At head of title: Aus dem Neurologischen ambulatorium an der Medizinischen universitäts-poliklinik, Basel. "Literaturverzeichnis": p. 17-18.

No description available.

Within a dual-route neuropsychological model, two distinct but interrelated pathways are used to read and write, known as the lexical and sublexical routes. Individuals with reading and writing deficits often exhibit impairments in one or both of these routes, and therefore must rely on the combined power of the integrated system in print processing tasks. The resultant errors reflect varying degrees of lexical and sublexical accuracy in a single production. However, no system presently exists to analyze bimodal errors robustly in both routes. The goal of this project was to develop a system that simultaneously, quantitatively, and qualitatively captures lexical and sublexical errors for single-word reading and writing tasks. This system evaluates responses hierarchically in both routes according to proximity to a target. Each response earns a bivariate score [sublexical, lexical], which is plotted along x and y axes. This scoring system was developed using data from a novel treatment study for patients with acquired alexia/agraphia. Repeated-measures multivariate analyses of variance and post hoc analyses revealed a significant treatment effect in both the lexical and sublexical systems. Qualitative analyses were also conducted to evaluate patterns of change in both the trained and untrained modalities, in the sublexical and lexical systems. Overall, the results of this study indicate that treatment-induced evolution of reading/writing responses can be comprehensively represented by this novel scoring system. / 2018-07-07T00:00:00Z

This study used an item-based approach to explore the full range of lexical-semantic (word frequency and imageability) and sublexical characteristics (regularity and consistency) of stimulus items. Oral reading and spelling-to-dictation data from 72 adults with acquired alexia/agraphia due to stroke or progressive aphasia were analyzed to determine unique influences of lexical-semantic and sublexical variables on performance. Multiple regression analyses were performed for each etiology and lesion group (i.e., perisylvian stoke, extrasylvian stroke, perisylvian atrophy, and extrasylvian atrophy). As expected, word frequency had a significant influence on reading and spelling performance in almost all contexts. Of particular interest was the consistent finding that written language performance associated with left perisylvian damage was moderated primarily by lexical-semantic features of stimuli (frequency and imageability), whereas performance by those with left extrasylvian damage was strongly influenced by sublexical features of sound-spelling regularity and, to a lesser extent, consistency.

Visual processing is the earliest core process required to support a normal reading system. However, little attention has been given to its role in any of the existing cognitive/computational models of reading. The ultimate goal of this thesis is to create a large-scale model of reading, which can generate phonology and semantics from print. Building such a model will allow for the exploration of a number of theoretically important cognitive phenomena in both normal and impaired reading including: font and size invariance; letter confusability; length effects; and pure alexic reading patterns. To achieve this goal, there are a number of important sub-goals that need to be achieved: (1) to develop a visual processing component which is capable of recognising letters in different fonts and sizes; (2) to produce a model that can develop useful intermediate (orthographic) representations as a consequence of learning; (3) to develop a set of semantic representations compact enough to allow efficient learning but that can still capture realistic semantic similarity relationships; (4) to integrate all the components together into a large-scale recurrent reading model; and (5) to extend the model to support picture naming, and to explore whether damage to the visual system can produce symptoms similar to those found in PA patients. Chapter 2 started by developing a simple feedforward network for letter recognition. The model was trained with letters in various transformations, which allowed the model to learn to deal with size and shape invariance problems as well as accounting for letter confusability effects and generalising to previously unseen letters. The model achieved this by extracting key features from visual input which could be used to support accurate letter recognition. Chapter 3 incorporated the letter recognition component developed in Chapter 2 into a word reading model. The reading model was trained on the mappings between print and phonology, with the orthographic representations which learn to emerge over training. The model could support accurate nonword naming and simulated the length by lexicality interaction observed in normal reading. A system of semantic representations was developed in Chapter 4 by using co-occurrence statistics to generate semantic codes that preserved realistic similarity relationships. Chapter 5 integrated all the components developed in the previous chapters together into a large-scale recurrent reading model. Finally, Chapter 6 extended the reading model to perform object recognition along with the reading task. When the model's visual system was damaged it was able to simulate the abnormal length effect typically seen in PA patients. The damaged model also showed impaired reaction times in object naming and preserved sensitivity to lexical/semantic variables in reading. The picture naming performance was modulated by visual complexity. In summary, the results highlight the importance of incorporating visual information into computational models of single word reading, and suggest that doing so will enable the exploration of a wide range of effects that were previously inaccessible to these types of connectionist models.

The effect of aphasia varies across patients and consequently their rehabilitation needs may differ. Access to participation in today’s information society requires good reading skills and this should be considered in a patient's rehabilitation plan. However, there are currently no guidelines available regarding the treatment of acquired reading impairments following stroke. The national guidelines for stroke rehabilitation states that speech and language intervention should be given when necessary and requested. There are currently no national guidelines for aphasia treatment that target specific language functions. The current study aims to gather and review the evidence of reading interventions for people with aphasia. A systematic search was made in medical databases to gather relevant studies. A quality review was conducted for the 19 studies found and information about the different methods used for therapy was gathered. This was followed by an evidence evaluation of each method. Although most studies demonstrated positive results, only 3 out of 13 methods were found to have a moderate to high evidence base. The majority of the methods were supported by single-case studies or lacked in quality, making it difficult to draw any conclusion about whether those methods are suitable to use in the clinic. This result also reflects the focus of the evidence grading system (GRADE) on study design and questions arose of its suitability for this type of aphasia research. / Bakgrund: Afasi efter stroke är en symptomdiagnos som innebär språknedsättning av varierande grad och omfattning. Rehabiliteringen för personer med afasi (PMA) ska vara individanpassad och logopedisk intervention ska erbjudas vid behov.  Lässvårigheter är en begränsande nedsättning som kan bidra till att PMA blir mer beroende av sin omgivning. Idag saknas riktlinjer för läsbehandling vid afasi efter stroke och en översikt av existerande evidensbaserade metoder behövs för klinisk verksamhet. Syfte: Studiens syfte var att genom en systematisk litteraturöversikt sammanställa evidensen för behandlingsmetoder vid nedsatt läsförmåga och läsförståelse hos PMA efter stroke. Metod: En systematisk litteratursökning gjordes i utvalda databaser och 19 studier identifierades för kvalitetsgranskning. Metoderna som användes i studierna sammanställdes och en evidensgradering utifrån GRADE-systemet utfördes. Resultat: 13 metoder identifierades varav 3 metoder, Phonomotor Treatment (PMT), Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) och tekniskt hjälpmedel som läsbehandling, ansågs ha måttligt till starkt vetenskapligt underlag. Resterande metoders vetenskapliga underlag bedömdes som otillräckliga. Slutsats: Positiv behandlingseffekt sågs överlag i samtliga metoder men begränsningar i antalet studier, deltagarantal och studiernas utförande sänkte evidensgraderna. Resultatet angående användning av metoderna PMT och SFA, med starkast evidensgradering, ifrågasätts då det präglats av evidensgraderingssystemets inriktning på studiers design.  Metoderna anses även behöva mer forskningsstöd för att kunna bedömas som lämpliga behandlingsmetoder i klinisk verksamhet.